Working all these years to be a paramedic, going to school, going to work, for what? To drive some people to the hospital? They're all just going to die anyway. Life is meaningless!
What the author is really saying is: "I find more meaning in the real world than in WoW."
But this isn't necessarily true for everyone.
Having said all that, I think WOW is more dangerous than heroin.
The illusion of success is there and almost tangible - if you didn't have to "wake up" to your neglected real body and nonexistent/handicapped real life.
And most people I know don't play WOW due to nihilism or at least not initially. They play it just for opposite reasons - it makes it easier for them to achieve something.
Disclaimer: I have played UO and got severely addicted by it. I also played WOW and EVE, I'm very competitive but in the end I figured that to reach the level of performance I wanted to - It would take me 8+ hours (rather 12+) of work a day. So I just quit the damn thing and focused on building my real person - no regrets. I saw WOW at a friend some months ago - and I instantly felt sick, the sounds, the animations... It just made me want to throw up.
If you are playing game all the time there is not much time you have to be "awake" and you may even never be fully "awake" to notice and appreciate your handicapped life.
People can have handicapped life even when they don't play games. They just stay for years in the same place despite their apparent efforts.
Nihilism being the worst of them all. One has to recognize that indeed, there are no supreme values, that there is no guaranteed path to salvation. And that in spite of this terrible truth one must form his own set of values that guide him on a journey that doesn't really lead anywhere specific, but one must travel the journey else he becomes damned.
Man is a creature of creation, to be happy Man has to improve upon himself and the world, to create by definition one needs to have some values. Else we just become decadent and decadence does not breed happiness.
They are re-arranging the materials of the game to create something they desire.
This is the same procedure people use in real life - we rearrange matter and energy to create conditions we desire.
There is nothing inherently more meaningful in reality compared to fiction. All of these things are exactly as meaningful as individuals find them to be.
Some people value wow for itself and there is nothing wrong or incorrect about this. Does it scare you to recognize that there is no logical basis for action?
The basis is emotional. Meaning itself is a word we use to refer to that emotional experience that occurs when we begin to care about life. Some people find it in collecting stamps, some people find it in wow, some people find it in medicine, some find it in the game of being a corporate executive.
None is logically or inherently more meaningful than another. It all comes down to irrational human values.
Road to 60 was actually pretty fun - but once you hit 60 - thats when it really begins. If you want to mean something, you have to raid almost every single day for 4-6 hours - else you don't get a guild and there are no casual raiding guilds since content is so hard that you need to be well versed to get it done.
I'm well aware that one is playing wow because it makes sense emotionally not rationally - but there is difference between "positive emotional action" and "negative emotional action" (meaning, repetition - grind, peer pressure, job like schedules,...).
So I would argue that no, people in WOW are not creating, they are destroying the very fabric that creates society.
Ayup. But then I've brought a few of those folks back, too. Folks that were dead from respiratory or cardiac arrest, or were dying of anaphylaxis or severe asthma, or recognizing an impending fatal condition and just talking somebody into one of those drives into medical care. Pushing a med or defibrillating or whatever, and having them survive. Sometimes just helping somebody get back into their chair, and having a nice chat. That helps offset the ugly parts.
As for heroin, medical-grade opiates tend to be something folks can maintain and can tolerate, it's the random weird stuff and the wildly different purities that can be a problem. Nalaxone can help there, but if I was pushing that, that patient was in compromise or in respiratory arrest from a likely opiate overdose, and usually headed for dead.
And yes, mental issues in real life can extend to and can involve WoW, paramedicine or heroin abuse. Or worse.
edit: fixed some wording
("Meaning" is not something that you can prove to others. Many people would find your job meaningless, while you may find it highly meaningful. The point is that each person's search for meaning is very individual.)
Which leads into existence, and whether all of us are merely a figment of the viewer's imagination.
And the point of saving someone's life? That discussion can go anywhere from existential to darwinian to whether you'll choose bluepill or redpill.
As for one trigger of these sorts of introspections, burnout can happen in EMS and medicine in general, and other environments that cope with chaos and death, too. Getting burnt is not fun, regardless of whether EMS was the trigger, or working in a high-stress startup, or whatever.
First, it's a bit more akin to life if you were a serf in medieval times where your whole life is a repetitive task to serve the local landowner (ie. Blizzard).
More importantly, WoW reduces rewards to regular, metered system which I believe is damaging to self-motivation.
There are no experiences in WoW that are unique, there is no unexplored territory, and no accomplishment you can achieve that wasn't predetermined by a designer.
It's tempting to make a philosophical analogy, but there's a major difference. If we are brains in vats we have no choice in the matter; but choosing WoW means choosing an experience in a constrained world, completely devoid of any of the nuance of the physical world, despite the quantity of shiny objects.
I propose this: a space game where you are encouraged to write bots. Place the space game in an ungodly huge procedurally generated universe. The base economic activity is based on mining.
Give users a custom scripting language and API to write their own bots. The number of bots and the amount of CPU time they can have is constrained by tokens in the game. (As in StarCraft.) Players can write scripts and license running copies for in-game money.
What will result? Macro-miners. Then pirates who raid the macro-miners. Then fleets of Macro-miner protection drones supervised by highly motivated Chinese professional gamers.
Voila! Emergent user-generated content!
For the coup -- base the procedural generation on interesting mathematics. Perhaps some macro-miner outfit can be motivated to find a pattern in prime numbers or pi!
Life isn't meaningless. Life is its own goal; doing well in life allows you to achieve happiness.
I think you have to make a more convincing case for why life has meaning and wow hasn't, you can't just spout platitudes and call it a day.
The gist is that Farmville isn't fun. Perhaps the problem is that WoW doesn't allow you to achieve happiness.
I didn't claim that it was meaningless. (I don't think that it is.) I don't really care about WoW. I was just responding to somebody's sad claim that "life is meaningless."
doing well in WoW allows you to achieve happiness
Doing well in WoW will not give you self esteem; it will not help you successfully deal with the real world (for example, providing for yourself materially and intellectually via a meaningful career). Successfully dealing with reality is a prerequisite of achieving an overall, lasting sense of happiness as a human being.
I think you have to make a more convincing case for why life has meaning and wow hasn't, you can't just spout platitudes and call it a day.
I'm not here to write a dissertation to prove my original claim--that you can find happiness in life, and (relatedly) that it has meaning, but that is objectively true. If you haven't or won't put forth the intellectual effort to discover this for yourself, that is truly sad.
Then you completely missed the point of what forensic wrote, because he did not claim that.
The problem with articles such as this, which is what both forensic and me addressed, is that a lot of people claim that time spent on video games is wasted, that time spent in any sort of rat race is bad, without any sort of backing for that claim. And if you don't back the argument you can flip it, which is what me and forensic did.
The author's statement amounted to: "WoW is meaningless for me and negatively impacts my life." forensic's statment amount to: "Well, who's to say life itself is any more meaningful?" My response is: "Wait a minute, I think it is meaningful." And I pointed out that you can achieve happiness in life (and by that I mean genuine self-esteem, not some temporary hedonistic pleasure like you get from playing a video game).
You're also wrong in that backing WAS offered for the claim that time spent on WoW is wasteful; the blogger talks about that a lot, e.g. how you end up just getting more gear so you can go to a bigger dungeon and get more gear, and how spending too much time on WoW blocks you from pursuing major goals in real life (like becoming a paramedic).
You can't tell someone else what is meaningful for them, which is what the OP is doing and you are implying.
I guarantee there are people who find WOW to be far more meaningful than building a career in the health field. That's the nature of humanity. We all find meaning in strange and unique ways.
I guarantee there are people who find WOW to be far more meaningful than building a career in the health field.
I can't argue that because "meaningful" is not well-defined. However, I can make a related statement, as follows. Building a career in the real world is far more valuable to a person, as a human being, than building a "career" in WoW, because it allows a person to achieve real values in life--e.g. monetary wealth, respect from peers, self-sufficiency, and ultimately self-esteem and the genuine, pervasive kind of happiness that self-esteem makes possible. Wow does not allow one to achieve those values.
Why are these things valuable? If we define valuable as worth a lot of money, obviously they are. If we define it as extremely useful or important, then that's just a judgement call again, no?
Now, there are lots of potential standards of value. e.g. "immediate pleasure" (hedonism); what's good for others (altruism); etc.
The proper standard of value is: what is good or bad for an individual's life, as a human being. So, that's how I'm defining "valuable" here.
Why is that the proper standard of value? Well, any deviation from that standard is going to be destructive to life, whereas following it will sustain life. Living successfully is a prerequisite (and the primary component) of happiness (in the fullest sense of the word--i.e. a non-contradictory enjoyment of being alive and all that that entails).
My statements here are not to be taken as standing on their own. There are lots of questions to ask. (A basic one would be: How can you claim to actually know anything, in the first place?.) I'm not going to try to present the full philosophical justification (i.e. present and validate an entire philosophical system), but it's out there if you look.
I dunno if this is cry for help, if yes I would like to help.
Edit: Why study to become a paramedic? Cause you want to. Cause it is your dream. Cause you ever wanted to work as paramedic. Cause it makes you feel better when you help people. Cause it makes you happy helping people. Cause it makes you happy to work with people.
And your reasons can just as easily be turned around.
Why work hard to win at WoW? Cause you want to. Cause it is your dream. Cause you ever [sic] wanted to be lvl 80. etc.
If your 'argument' applies equally well to any position it is completely meaningless.
Oddly enough, not everyone agrees with that. Some of them are even working on that problem.
I can make these arguments all day. Immortality is not inherently meaningful.
However, current evidence is overwhelmingly in favour of the non existence of souls. therefore, death isn't the next adventure, it's nothing.
About the meaning of immortality, you may want to read the Fun Theory sequence at http://lesswrong.com
"You believe we have souls. In that case, the death problem has already been solved by Mother Nature, God, or what have you. Current evidence is overwhelmingly in favour of the non existence of souls. therefore, death isn't a possible adventure, it's nothing. About the meaning of immortality, I recommend the Fun Theory sequence at lesswrong.com"
No I don't believe in souls. You are assuming beliefs that I don't have.
Nihilism does not require a belief in anything supernatural. I do believe that death is real, and therefore I believe that dying is something that happens to people. The point is that you can't prove in any objective way that death is less meaningful than life.
This is not really due to the nature of life and death, it is due to the nature of meaning itself.
That's probably true of the vast majority of people, including addicted WoW players.
In WoW, your character has several skills, stats, and abilities that define it. You choose which ones to work on, how to shape your character, and then you put in the time to make that happen. But what about your skills? You are not getting stronger or better at wielding a two-handed weapon. You are getting better at playing WoW, you are improving your hand-eye coordination, you are bettering your combat-driven teamwork abilities, and you are getting better at determination: being patient and working towards a goal.
The problem comes in the illusion of progression. Your character improves almost continuously, building its skills to a point where it is better than all the other characters. Eventually your character reaches a ceiling, but you can always create another character with different skills and do it all again. But you stop progressing much sooner. Early on, your ability to play WoW tapers off to a suitably-high level such that the real gain is in improving your character. You master the conventions of in-game communication. You develop a routine and diligently set to work improving your characters without question. You stop progressing.
But what happens when you reach that ceiling, when you become the best? In WoW and many other video games, the game ceases to be fun when you are as powerful as possible. Since someone else owns the experience, you are stuck waiting for them to tell you what to do with your newfound abilities. This is why I regret the time I sank into becoming an Expert guitar player on Rock Band. When your playing abilities max out, the game becomes a chore, even if you don't realize it. The best rhythm game players spend their time playing the same songs over and over again in an effort to play them flawlessly. The game ceases to be a game.
In "real life," if you manage to "max out" a "real skill," you can actually do something else, anything you want, with it. Rather than hope that song that I love comes out on Rock Band so that I can put my hundreds of hours to work playing it, I could have spent hundreds of hours playing real guitar and be able to play any song. If I sink a lot of time into becoming a great comedian, I can hit the road, make people all of the place laugh, and make money doing it. If I spend time improving my health and fitness, I can run marathons, play competitive sports, or become a vigilante hero. The choice is entirely up to me.
That's what it boils down to. Is your leveling work tying you to a system where you can't control the direction you're heading in? In play, in art, in work, and in life, make sure that the skills you're improving are flexible in a way that allows you to apply them in any way you wish. Otherwise, you're just playing someone else's game.
Note: I used quotes around "real life" and "real skill" because I'm cheating by defining them somewhat circularly. A "real skill" is a skill that can be applied in many different ways, limited only by creativity. "Real life" is the arena in which you practice and execute those real skills.
Sure, some people prefer the blue pill.
But the real world is a strict superset of WoW, and thus (to me) much more interesting.
But this doesn't extend to others. Your argument is about subjective values - you value the superset - but this is wholly subjective as well.
Death is a superset of life, therefore I value death more than life, therefore you should kill yourself to find true meaning. By staying alive you're choosing the blue pill.
(I can make these arguments all day. You're never going to be able to prove to others that your form of meaning is somehow rational or logical. All of your arguments are back rationalization - postdiction.)
"I find the red pill more meaningful because it is redder than the blue pill and red is the colour of the sunset and the sun is really big." <-- This argument is no less arbitrary than your "superset" argument.
Um, no. It's pretty well established that one can start or stop playing WoW at will from real life. There is no evidence that one can return to real life from death.
Of course there are some belief systems that claim that death leads to an unimaginably wonderful heaven, but even those belief systems tend to discourage suicide.
What about all the dead people who come back to life thanks to medical intervention?
This is an outdated perspective. Loads of people now living were once dead.
Scientific evidence indicates: Matter starts out dead, becomes alive, then becomes dead again, then rots into the ground and eventually becomes alive again.
After your corpse rots it becomes dirt, the dirt is eaten by plants and insects, who are eaten by animals, and the animals are eaten by humans, and that matter is then used by humans to create babies, and then babies are alive.
This is a fact. Dead things become alive through natural processes. But to be alive you first have to be dead.
Your superset theorem of meaning is probably a rationalization of some deep emotional bias that has roots in your genes and early childhood environment.
Then they weren't really dead.
> This is an outdated perspective. Loads of people now living were once dead.
Maybe if you're using an outdated definition of death. By death I mean brain death, from which there is no recovery by definition ("the irreversible end of all brain activity").
The cessation of breathing etc. is no longer a useful definition of "death" precisely because of the "coming back to life" you describe:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death#Problems_of_definition
> Dead things become alive through natural processes. But to be alive you first have to be dead.
The dead things are not "you" in any useful sense of the word. Yes I know it's the same atoms, but "you" are not just your atoms. "You" are an emergent pattern of thoughts and memories, which cannot begin to emerge until your brain develops.
Sure, you can take the cosmological approach that we are all connected, all things are one etc., but in practice, once your definition of "you" no longer distinguishes "you" from "not you", it's no longer a useful word.
> Your superset theorem of meaning is probably a rationalization of some deep emotional bias that has roots in your genes and early childhood environment.
Sure, I clearly stated it was just my opinion. All opinions have roots in genes and experiences. But the experience of arguing with you has thus far failed to change my opinion, it's merely persuaded me that you use very different definitions for words than I do ;)
My point is simply that death itself can hold just as much meaning as life because meaning is deeply subjective. No scientific fact changes this.
Tomorrow we may discover a way to raise the dead - to turn the people you currently define as irreversibly brain impaired into... living humans.
The ancients used to refer to the breathe of life, now you have to refer to a very controversial operational definition.
I contend that this has little effect on the subjective human experience of meaning and whether or not the human emotions find meaning in death.